offered them the independence to engage the questions which seemed to themmost interesting, the tasks they thought most promising, the life they chooseto lead.

[olnt C. HirshGeorgetowll Ulliversity

1 Throughout I refer to my biography, Hope Emily Allen: Medieval Scholarship and Feminism(Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1988), and to the Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meechand Hope Emily Allen, EETS 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). The unique manuscript whichcontains the Book, formeriy owned by Colonel William E.1. Butler-Bowdon, was said after Butler-Bowdon'sdeath at Sotheby's, on 24 June 1980, as lot 58, and is now a Select manuscript in the British Library, BLMS Additional 61823. On Hope Allen's deeply conflicted relationship with Meech see Hope Emily Allen, pp.99-130. The title the Book of Margery Kempe was assigned by Hope Allen; Meech sought at one point torename it the "Journal of Margery Kernpe" (the narne is still preserved at the bottom of the frontispiece ofthe EETS edition), but was dissuaded frorn doing so by members of the EETS Comrnittee.

2 For a discussion of the colonial identity of the EETS founders see Kathieen Biddick, The Shock ofMedievalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 92-96. It is true that the eariy EETSReports, often written by Furnivall explicitly to raise money, sounded, sornetimes crudely, themes andattitudes which he hoped would appeal to a mass audience, but Furnivall's values and perspectiveswere not those of later editors and Council mernbers, and as Derek Pearsall arnong others has pointedout, Furnivall's own social and personal attitudes were as progressive as any. See Derek Pearsall,"Frederick Jarnes Furnivall (1825-1910)," in Medieval Scholarship. Biographical Studies on theFormation of a Discipline, ed. Helen Darnico, et aI., Volume 2: Literature and Philology (New York andLondon: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), pp. 125-138. On like problems, both ideologicai and other, withthe Oxford English Dictionary, see John Willinsky, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

3 The verbatim republication of two already published and not greatly distinguished articles by theeditor is another curious aspect of an altogether curious edition. Most publishers would have indicatedthat such studies simply be cited and quoted as needed, which was and is the usual practice. ButArnauld acknowledges that "the Board of Trinity College, Dublin ... readily and graciously agreed tocontribute a substantial sum towards the printing of this edition" (p. Xi), and it was no doubt thatsubvention which gave hirn a free hand to republish the articies, and perhaps also to forrnulate hisslnqularly unrernitting attack on Hope Allen without editorial intervention.

"THEEVER-GROWING ARMY OF SERIOUS GIRL STUDENTS":THE LEGACY OF HOPEEMILY ALLENIn 1928 Father Herbert Thurston reviewed Hope Emily Allen's Writillgs Ascribedto Richard Rolle in terms which appreciated both Allen's long-term contributionto women's scholarship, and the drawbacks of her particular methodology.Thurston highlights the thoroughness of Allen's work, but also suggests thateven then Allen's approach set standards which not everyone could, or perhapsshould, follow:

the ever-growing army of serious girl students who are keen aboutsuccess in the research work which was formerly the monopoly of theirmale rivals, will not be wanting in appreciation of what Miss Allen hasachieved. We are tempted to think that she has perhaps been even too

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meticulous, too conscientious, in her hunting down of every recordedtext and every reference which could afford a clue to the elucidation ofthe rather obscure problems of Richard Rolle's literary activities. Thestandard she sets would seem to demand too large a proportion ofman's limited working days to be practicable for any but a very few(Thurston 1928,370).

In spite of Thurston's sense of the importance of Allen's contributions, and hisbelief that she set "a heroic example" (Thurston 1928, 370), sixty years later,when John C. Hirsh consolidated his work on Allen in his important biography,Hope EmilyAllen:Medieval Scholarship andFeminism, he wrote that even in 1988Allen's "achievements have gone largely unobserved" (Hirsh 1988, xi). Indeed,in 1991, Norman F. Cantor's Inventing TheMiddle Ages, a book which is otherwisevery aware of gender issues, boldly asserted that "Eileen Power is the onlywoman medievalist who belongs in the array of the founders and shapers of ourvision of the Middle Ages during the first seventy years of this century" (Cantor1991,382). Histories of medieval and women's scholarship have not includedAllen, partly because she was an independent scholar, not attached to anuniversity, and was only recognized by professional associations later in her Iife.!

While she was initially known and primarily respected for her work on Rolle,then for her participation in the Early English Text Society's 1940 edition of TheBook ofMargery Kempe, undoubtedly her reputation would have been enhancedhad her projected second volume on the Book for EETS, tantalizingly flagged inthe notes to the EETS edition, ever actually appeared." Hirsh's account of theproduction of the Book is a moving experience. His description of the anguishand hurt Hope Emily Allen felt is an important contribution to a history ofscholarship that includes the emotional as well as the intellectual, andacknowledges the domestic and personal aspects that are part of any writing, nomatter how objective that scholarship might be. It is distressing to see theexcitement and enthusiasm of discovery end up in recrimination, to see Allen'sconfidence eroded, her energy evaporate. It is disappointing not to see the longdreamed-of second volume. Some aspects of the story of Allen's involvement inthe production of the Book are depressingly familiar in feminist history. We readof aspirations thwarted, of struggles in climates and cultures, which, whilededicated to understanding history, to humanism, also made it very difficult forwomen to succeed and develop. It is all too familiar.

In what follows I want to pick up on some aspects of Allen's legacy, and to add asketch of how, while Allen was an independent scholar outside the academy, nomore than Eileen Power was she "alone as a woman in her field" (Berg 1996, 2).This side of her story reveals the enormously positive interaction between Allenand her friends and collaborators, the genuine love and affection that existedbetween them, and the tremendous benefits these communities conferred on thescholarship of those involved. Allen was not alone in her endeavors, not isolated inher work, in spite of the fact that she did not enjoy the benefits that many currentwriters and critics do as a result of working in tertiary institutions, with other

colleagues, teaching and interacting with students. Alongside an analysis of thedifficulties faced by women scholars early in the twentieth century, there are alsostories of collaboration between women as intellectual workers to be celebrated.How did Allen's position as an independent scholar influence what she left behindher? How does an understanding of her work and the principles on which it wasbased reveal some of the differences between scholarship within and outsideacademic institutions, between the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries?

One of Allen's great contributions was to the development of an historicalsecular criticism which extended not only the range of material to be considered,but also the kind of questions to be asked of it. While Allen's education at BrynMawr College from 1902to 1905included philological and linguistic analysis,and she contributed to the Middle English Dictionary at Michigan University, shealso firmly believed in what become known as history from the bottom up asopposed to history from the top down. In notes for her work on Aitcrene Rhule,Allen wrote of the need for a "history of culture," and for an interdisciplinaryapproach which has since developed into cultural and historical studies, andhistories of everyday life, in Raymond Williams' terms." As Allen conceived of it:

my work would combine literary and historical research andconcentrate on what would interpret religion as it was brought home tothe individual, rather than as it touched ecclesiastical institutions ortheological doctrines.'

Part of her interest in medieval studies was in the pictures it offered of medievallife, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons why she found The Book ofMargery Kempe such an engaging subject. In her notes towards the projected"BMK II," she wrote of producing a "synthesis of Margery the mystic and thewoman," suggesting an integration of the religious aspects of the Book with itsbroader context. In 1949she wrote to Mabel Day, secretary of EETS, of her "wideranging desire to make it my magnum opus-in which all the absorptions of myvarious incarnations coalesce." Back in 1937,when working on the first EETSvolume, she combined research on continental women mystics, which she feltsure would help explain the context in which Kempe operated, with trying to getat the feeling of the time and place in which Kempe lived. After having visitedKing's LYIU1 for two one-day trips, Allen returned for a five-day stay, and "whenlibraries were closed I walked all day in Lynn, poking into all the corners both ofstreets and churches. I am a great believer in the living picture as a stimulus tostudy."? Allen's methodology was not of the kind parodied by Paul Zumthor,where "withdrawn into the bookish tranquillity of the study, one restoredoneself in a slow, meticulous labor of establishing and classifying index cardswhose effect was to remove the drama from life, death and the destiny of men"(Zumthor 1986,49). Her approach was of a more holistic or organic kind,anticipating the development of new medievalism in expanding the range ofissues that were relevant to an understanding of a text." While producing herpart of The Book ofMargery Kempe did involve careful study of language, the useof idiom and proverbs, it also involved the other dimensions of the text.

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Allen was part of developments in the areas of women's history, women'sstudies, interdisciplinary studies, and medieval studies. Her work on Kempeformed the basis for Kempe studies today. Much of the first wave of work onKempe concerned her claims to have direct experience from God, and whetheror not this was true. Critics lined up on either side of the "is she/isn't shegenuine" divide. Early work on Kempe came predominantly from men fromreligious backgrounds, with specific religious interests." Allen, who curiouslydescribed herself as a "Christian agnostic,"? focused on aspects of Kempe's bookin a broader sense-looking for the contexts of her religious experience andpossible connections with other female mystics-and on the text as both literaryartifact and historical document. She was one of the first to argue that the bookshould not be read simply as historical fact, but that Kempe's purposes shouldalso be considered. It was part of her view that the artistic and rhetoricaldimensions of the text mattered in an overall interpretation, or to put it inBarbara Newman's terms, that we should see this text within "the parameters ofliterary expression" (Newman 1995,15). "It must never be forgotten," Allenargued, that Kempe's book "was a work of active propaganda." In a letter ofF~bruary 1938she wrote of how this would be demonstrated in "BMK Il."

my line-by-line study of the work this winter has convinced me thatMargery expected to be a Saint, and that in all likelihood the book wasprepared for prospective hagiography...Considerable annotation has tobe added to bring this out. 10

Allen was at the beginning of a line which saw Kempe's work as significant in itsown right, as connected with saints' lives and other religious texts, but as havingan independent importance. Today the main interests in Kempe studies areKempe's gender, the literary and historical aspects of the text, and the sense ofthe self that the text displays. These were all issues that Allen picked up on, andthese have all remained abiding concerns of Kempe criticism."

It is unfortunate, then, that Allen did not leave to history a second volume onKempe, nor a clear enough outline for someone else to finish." Her legacy, toKempe studies in particular, is incomplete. It seems partly, as Thurstonsuggested, that Allen's desire to have the fullest picture that she could of the textshe was working on brought its own problems. In relation to this, Allen receivedencouraging, and admonitory reminders. Mabel Day, in 1949,had passed on aninquiry from EETS' C. T. Onions:

what he really wants badly to know clearly [is] when you will be able toget down to Vol. II in bitter earnest. He is afraid the time will nevercome. So many of our publications are unfinished because the editorsnever get beyond the text! Some of them have been handed on to a latergeneration to finish."

In 1953,thirteen years after the first EETSvolume, and nearly twenty years afterAllen was called in by the Victoria and Albert Museum to identify Colonel

Ell

Butler-Bowdon's manuscript, A. C. Baugh wrote to Allen about" BMK II,"advising"After all there must be an end to revision sometime."!"

There are many reasons why Allen did not in fact complete the proposed secondvolume for EETS, and gave up on it a few years before her death in 1960. John C.Hirsh suggests that the psychological and personal difficulties of producing thefirst volume, as well as ill-health, were contributing factors. There is also theissue of Allen's inclusive methodology. Her excitement, energy and enthusiasmwere all important characteristics of her work, but as she so charminglyacknowledged herself, they were also part of her weakness. Again, in a letter toMabel Day, she summarized some of the problems of being interested in themany aspects that the Kempe text suggested to her. "I sent you yesterday afearful budget-to demonstrate my difficulties in composition through my mindsprouting like a potato brot from the cellar, when anything comes up thatinterests me."15 Her highly developed sense of self-awareness told her of hershortcomings, expressed in a different metaphor: "I realize that if I were dealingwith money instead of research, I would be a defaulter who didn't balance mybooks, I am so much behind." And again, "I am as irresponsible as a child attimes in giving way to enthusiasms which only time will dispel." 16

Some of these problems suggest a lack of discipline, or an inability to meetdeadlines, which may be linked to Allen's status as an independent scholar. Shewas not for any length of time employed by a tertiary institution and does notseem to have harbored any kind of personal or career ambitions. Allen's financialexistence depended on various grants, from such bodies as the American Councilof Learned Societies,and from a private income derived from the OneidaCorporation." The rewards for Allen and those like her were not those of a salary,institutional status, and a career path. Rather they were close collaborativerelations with other scholars across the world, and England in particular, findinganswers to all kinds of questions, and contributing to an expanding field ofknowledge. Part of the pleasure for Allen was the ability to follow ideas whereverthey took her, to free-float. If an institutional affiliation might have providedstructures and mechanisms to help her research, those structures might also havecircumscribed her work. This is the double edge of life within the Academy. Ifdeadlines, and anxieties about tenure and promotion are the current bane of manyacademic lives, then they also no doubt focus the mind on producing and finishingpieces of work. For Allen and her correspondents it was a different matter, ofchasing the hares of the scholarly imagination wherever they went, of a desire to"Follow Truth and if it leads you to the Gates of Hell, Knock':"

Allen contributed to medieval studies specifically through her publications, andmore generally to the intellectual climate of her times through the disseminationof medieval material in ways that refused disciplinary boundaries. She activelyencouraged others, and shared the material to which she had access. She invitedSanford Brown Meech to work on the Kempe manuscript, to prepare it for EETS,and rather than produce a modernized version herself, thought it appropriatethat the manuscript's owner, Colonel Butler-Bowdon, be asked to do it. Allen's

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disinterestedness, her desire to make material available to other scholars and ageneral audience is particularly striking from today's perspective when scholarlystatus is so dependent on publications. Had Allen been working within anacademic institution she might well have been more self-protective. These aresome of the costs and benefits.

There is also a third way in which Allen contributed to medieval scholarship,which cuts against the notion of personal ambition or career, and is an aspect ofher work outside the Academy. In this sense Allen's contributions go beyond therecord of her own ideas and arguments about medieval texts, as evident inpublications to which her name was attached. She had a wider influence, and hernotes reveal a sense of how she worked, what her aims were, and herrelationships with other scholars. From copies and scraps of letters we can seethe kind of network she was part of and how letter-writing formed part of herpractice as a scholar, particularly during World War II when she was back in theUSA, physically separated from the friends and contacts she had made inEngland. These letters suggest the strong sense of responsibility she felt to hermaterial. To Helen Gardner she wrote that it is "wonderfully stimulating" toknow "that there are watchdogs on the field still collaborating on subjects [such]as the edition of Julian [of Norwich]."19 Allen saw herself as having aresponsibility to promulgate, share and protect the medieval material to whichshe had access. Often consulted as to who was working on what, she advised asto what needed doing, and occasionally who should or should not be doing it.She clearly saw herself as patrolling the boundaries of her areas of scholarship,and this was important to her. Whether her work resulted in publications of herown was not the central issue for her.

,Allen wrote long letters in reply to new and established scholars, to help boththem and herself. "I have adopted the policy," she explained "of going a little farafield for my correspondent, in order to sum up the subject for myself in astatement of what I now thinks [sic]which I can later use."20 Writing to otherpeople working in similar fields enabled Allen to summarize her own position,so that she was connected to the academic and intellectual communities, yetindependent of them, protecting her own integrity. Both of these things wereimportant to her.

I am not in the least gregarious, tho devoted to many friends. But to mescholarship has always been something very individual-as religionwould be (wherein I would not relish the old OC [OneidaCommunity]).The analogy of the OC shows what can be done bycorporate action, and I realize I would gain many advantages by beingmore gregarious. But then for research I would lose independence...many years now of having all sorts of persons to ask my help-or I asktheirs-or to some degree collaborate (at a distance generally) withothers in my field-makes me feel one has to know the other long andwell before the full contingencies can come to light-hence I am wary

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about human judgments now-until the time element has had a goodchance to test. ...21

Here Allen directly canvasses her sense of why it would not have suited her to bepart of an academic institution and what that cost her. Above all, Allen valued herintellectual independence. The reference back to her understanding of the OneidaCommunity and its socialistic attitudes is telling. Allen never seemed to back awayfrom some of the principles of the community, yet she argued that it workedbecause of its commitments to both license and discipline, and that it stilldemonstrated the "complications involved in any form of social organisation: itbred as many problems and injustices as it solved."22 While the gregariousness ofworking in an academic institution might well have furnished her with a differentkind of status, and an income, Allen felt it might have compromised her, both interms of time and her particular interests. Letters from other women scholars who

.were employed for their intellectuals labors may well have contributed to Allen'sdesire to stay outside these academic communities. For example, Helen Gardnerwrote to Allen in 1947that her teaching commitments kept her focussed on theseventeenth century rather than on Walter Hilton. "1think I am by nature far moreof a teacher than a scholar," wrote Gardner, in a manner strikingly modest givenGardner's own scholarly output."

Yet while Allen clearly asserted her desire for independence, and her concernthat an academic structure might compromise that independence, it is also clearthat there were nevertheless many demands on her as an independent scholar. ltis not surprising that she felt ambivalent about the amount of work required ofher by others. It inhibited her own production, as she wrote: "The pressure ofunprinted work-about which people tend to write me-is trying."24Perhapsacademic structures would to some extent have protected her from theinundation of free-lance inquiries, and provided her with a protective space inwhich to work, but this was not her assessment. Yet her sense of contributing tothe production of others was also a comfort to her. Though her own publicationrate had slowed, she felt "1have at least done a lot of I think helpfulcollaboration by correspondence.v'"

She had, of course, done that and more. Hirsh's list of her works from 1910 to1942 indicates the varied and scholarly nature of Allen's work. It is probably notan exaggeration to say that her identification of the Kempe manuscript was oneof the most significant finds of medieval manuscripts in the twentieth century.Certainly the newspaper coverage in the late 1930s saw it as"a remarkablediscovery" (Church Times 9 October 1938), "the first autobiography in the Englishtongue" (Sphere 17 October 1938)and "a literary event" (Eastern EveningNews,Norwich, 6 October 1936).In comparison with the Winchester Malory's Marted'Arihur identified in the same year, 1934, the Kempe find was perceived to be"more unexpected and more important," according to The Times 30 September1936.These same reports also indicate that Allen did not always get the creditshe deserved. The Michigan Dailyof January 61937, for example, acknowledgesSanford Brown Meech in its headline: "Meech to Publish Manuscript of Pioneer

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English Biography,"26 and adds in smaller print, "Hope Emily Allen iscontributing an introduction and notes on mysticism." A copy of this article inAllen's own collection carries her comment, and perhaps hope, that thisforegrounding of Meech was not his work, but a journalist's. Her annotationsalso suggest the slight she felt at being marginalized. She had identified themanuscript, announced it in TheTimes, and been charged with producing anedition. The fact that she then shared this work did not mean that she did notstill feel very proprietorial about it. We can see, from this newspaper coverage,the difference that gender and academic status might make. Meech had a Ph.D.and an academic position. Allen had neither at this stage.

Yet Allen's work was later recognized by academic institutions. In 1946she wasawarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Smith College, wasinducted into the Medieval Academy of America in 1948,27 and in 1960was"designated one of the seventy-six most distinguished graduates of Bryn MawrCollege" (Hirsh 1988,140).We do not know exactly how Allen felt about thesehonors, but we do have a delightful account of how one of her closest friends feltabout her own recognition. Joan Wake met and corresponded with Allen fromthe 1920s to Allen's death in 1960.Wake, unlike Allen, did not have a universityeducation at all, but dedicated a substantial proportion of her life to collectingand preserving local historical records, and founded the NorthamptonshireRecord Office. In 1953Wake was awarded an honorary MA from OxfordUniversity, and wrote to Allen, in terms that she knew Allen would understand,that this recognition was an "apotheosis."

Oh! my dear-having been and felt such an outsider all my life-to beinside the fold! it is wonderful-... have.tried to do the work for itsown sake, but felt that if there was to be any recognition there was onlyone kind which I would appreciate as really worth having-i. e. fromthe academic world, and now it has come and in such a perfect way andI do feel so grateful.

Letters between Allen and Wake characteristically describe not only thedifficulties of scholarship outside the Academy, but also the possibilities thatexisted for collaboration and companionship beyond the walls of tertiaryinstitutions. Hirsh's biography of Allen illuminates the problems Allen faced as awoman scholar outside academic structures, yet the letters between Allen andher friends also reveal how much fun they had, and how much they shared.Wake's description of the graduation at Oxford University, for her absent friend,charmingly demonstrates her ability to appreciate academic honors withoutmissing the arcane quality of the rituals. "The whole thing," Wake wrote toAllen, "was so absurdly like a wedding without the music, cake andbridegroom," and later she wrote of the undergraduates "kneeling in rowsbefore the Vice-Chancellor, and being banged on the head with a Bible,while hesaid 'In nomine' (bang) 'Dei Patris' (bang), 'et Filii' (bang) 'et Spiritus Sancti'(bang)-that must go back to the thirteenth century surely."29

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While recognizing the difficulties faced by these independent women scholars, itis also important to acknowledge their friendships, their keen senses ofthemselves and each other, and how much these relationships contributed totheir ability to produce work. Their enthusiasms about each other's work ismatched with a corresponding self-modesty, as characterized in one particularexchange between Wake and Allen. Whether Wake had a university degree ornot, Allen clearly regarded Wake as an historian, to which Wake replied" Don'tcall me a 'historian'-I am a cross between a missionary and a ferret that's all." 30

Allen's legacy, then, has general and specific components. She was recognized inher own time for her work on medieval mysticism, on Richard Rolle and onAncrene Rhule. She was part of the foundation of Kempe studies, an enthusiasticpromoter of the Book in the broadest terms. Put simply, Allen recognized theKempe manuscript, and established some of the reasons for its significance.Others followed. She also contributed to the knowledge and work of thosearound her. She shared the knowledge she had, and put medieval manuscriptsin front of those people capable of explaining them and bringing them to a wideraudience. Her generosity in these areas cost her time and energy that othersmight well have kept to themselves. Indeed, it is part of John C. Hirsh'sargument that this generosity cost her too much personally. Her letters and notescontain insights into the decisions and dilemmas that are part and parcel of anintellectual life, and consistently demonstrate Allen's optimism and confidencein the growth and development of work on medieval texts. While Allen workedoutside the Academy, she was not on her own and her letters testify to the strongand productive relationships she had with other scholars. She was far from beingsentimental about scholarly collaboration, but its importance wascertainly acentral assumption. She was part of a move away from medieval scholarshipbased on philology, towards cultural history. She focussed specifically on issuesrelating to women and on seeing connections between women, both in the pastand in her own time. She hoped that her own work would make a difference,and what she envisaged as a way forward has become a major strand ofmedieval studies.

If I am not able to present my facts so as to bring out their full interest, Ihave at least collected them, and someone who comes after me is likelyto be able to use them for a stimulating study of the sort of literaryhistory which is as much history as it is literature, and as muchliterature as it is history.

Marea MitchellDepartment ofEnglish, Macquarie University

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1 For work on women scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and theirinvolvement in universities and historical associations see, for example, Smith 1984; Goggin 1992; Berg1996; Shils 1996.

2 Hirsh's biography provides a fascinating account of the story behind the EETS edition, which hedescribes as involving "the singie greatest misjudgment of her academic career" (Hirsh 1988, 113), aswell as elucidating some of the reasons why the second volume by Allen never appeared. See inparticular chapter 5, "Michigan and the Book."

3 Raymond Williams' work (1981) has more directly articulated political bases, rooted in Marxismand cultural materialism, but Allen's work is part of the move towards a secular, broadly based culturalhistory.

4 This is from material held by the Bryn Mawr College Archives. Aside from material and argumentsprovided in Hirsh's biography, this essay relies on unpublished material held by the Bodleian Library,and Bryn Mawr College Archives. Bodleian Library, MS. English Letters d.268 was not de-restricted andcatalogued until 1995, after Hirsh's 1988 biography. The Northamptonshire Record Office's Joan WakeCollection also holds material not assessed in his book. Much of the material has not been catalogued,and throughout the following notes I give the fullest references available.

5 Bodleian Library, MS. English Letters c.212.

6 Hope Emily Allen Collection, Bryn Mawr College Archives.

7 See, for example, Brownlee, Brownlee and Nichols 1991, and Bloch and Nichols 1996.

8 "A Benedictine of Stanbrook" was one of the first people to discuss Kempe's manuscript in 1938.Following this, the Book was initially canvassed, sometimes dismissively, within the context of medievalmysticism, rather than in its own right, and the commentators often had explicit religious affiliations. Forexample, T. W. Coleman describes himself as "the first free Churchman to issue a book on this subject"(1938; 7); Herbert Thurston (1955) was an ordained Catholic priest; W. R. Inge (1959) was Dean of StPauls; and Martin Thornton (1960) was a priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd.

9 Bodleian Library, MS. English Letters, c.212.

10 Hope Emily Allen Collection, Bryn Mawr College Archives.

11 it is impossible to list all the recent work on Kempe that takes up these issues, but the followingare just some examples of work which could be said to follow the interests of a secular, feminist criticismexploring issues of the materiality of the text and its cultural production as much as its inherent content,in ways which are suggested by Allen's own work: Beckwith 1986; Lochrie 1991; Holbrook 1992; Staley1994.

12 Clarissa Atkinson was one of the first to pick up the trail of Allen's work on The Book of MargeryKempe, as her comments in Mystic and Pilgrim 1983 suggest.

13 Hope Emily Allen Collection, Bryn Mawr College Archives.

14 Ibid.

15 Letter to Mabel Day, March 17, 1949, Bodleian Library, MS. English Letters c.212.

16 Hope Emily Allen Collection, Bryn Mawr College Archives.

17 Allen's parents lived for a time in the Oneida Community, an experimental socialistic groupbased at Oneida, New York, which broke up in 1880. Some of its financial interests continued and stillexist in the Oneida Silverware Company, and Allen spent much of her life living on property which wasoriginally part of the community.

18 The Joan Wake Collection, Northamptonshire Record Office. Joan Wake was one of Allen'soldest and closest friends. Wake was the founder of the Northamptonshire Record Office, and sharedAllen's love of history, and local history in particular.

19 Bodleian Library, MS. English Letters d.268.

20 Hope Emily Allen Collection, Bryn Mawr College Archives.

21 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng!. Misc. c.484.

22 Drafts of letters in MS. Eng. Misc c.484. The first of these here seems to be addressed toGeorge Bernard Shaw from Allen's reference to "your Man and Superman."

23 Letter from Helen Gardner to Allen, March 11 1947; MS. English Letters d.268.

24 Bodleian Library, MS. English Letters c.212.

25 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng!. Misc. c.484.

26 This headline incidentally provides one example of the ambiguity over whether the Book were abiography or autobiography. This ambiguity was continued in R. W. Chambers' introduction to Butler­Bowdon's modernized edition which referred to it as both.

27 John C. Hirsh (1988, 139-40) quotes a letter from Allen which documents her awareness of thelack of recognition of women scholars, and attributes her own success to the 'fluke' of knowing ProfessorNellie Nelson. For histories of the recognition of other women scholars, see Smith 1984 and Goggin1992.

28 The Joan Wake Collection, Northamptonshire Record Office.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Bodleian, MS. Eng!. Misc. c.484.

WORKS CITED

UNPUBLISHED ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS;

The Hope Emily Allen Papers, Bryn Mawr College Archives, Pennsylvania, USA.

MSS English Letters c.212, d.217 & d.268, and MS. Eng!. Misc. c.484, Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK.

The Joan Wake Papers, Northarnptonshire Record Office, UK.

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OTHER:

A Benedictine of Stanbrook. 1938. "Margery Kempe and the Holy Eucharist." In The DownsideReview 56:468-82.

Atkinson, Clarissa, W. 1983. Mystic and Piigrim: The Book and the Worid of Margery Kempe. Ithaca:Cornell University Press.

Beckwith, Sarah. 1986. "A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe." InMedieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers: 34-57. Brighton: Harvester Press.

Berg, Maxine. 1996. A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889-1940. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Bloch, R. Howard and Stephen G. Nichols. 1996. Medievalism and the Modernist Temper.Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Brownlee, Marina S., Kevin Brownlee and Stephen G. Nichois. 1991. The New Medievalism.Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Butler-Bowdon, W., ed. 1936. The Book of Margery Kempe 1436. A Modern Version. London:Jonathan Cape.

Cantor, Norman F. 1991. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the GreatMedievalists of the Twentieth Century. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.

Coleman, T. W. 1938. English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century. London: Epworth Press.

Goggin, Jacqueline. 1993. "Challenging Sexual Discrimination in the Historical Profession: WomenHistorians and the American Historical Association, 1890-1940." In The American Historical Review 97(3): 769-802.

Hirsh, John C. 1988. Hope Emily Allen: Medieval Scholarship and Feminism. Norman, Oklahoma:Pilgrim Books.

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. 1992. "'About Her': Margery Kempe's Book of Feeling and Working." In TheIdea of Medieval Literature: New Essays in Honor of Donald R. Howard, eds. James M. Dean andChristian K. Zacher. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Inge, W. R. 1959. Mysticism in Religion. London: Hutchinson Press.

Lochrie, Karma. 1991. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press.

Meech, Sanford Brown, ed., with prefatory note by Hope Emiiy Allen. 1940. The Book of MargeryKempe. EETS 212 O.S. London: Oxford University Press.

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ELEANOR PRESCOTT HAMMONDEleanor Prescott Hammond is remembered now chiefly as the compiler of twoscholarly volumes, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (1908) and English Versebetween Chaucer and Surrey (1927), both of them pioneering works in their day,and so thorough and accurate in their scholarship that they are still of use and tobe valued.

Eleanor Prescott Hammond was born at Worcester, Mass., on April 26, 1866, thedaughter of Andrew Hill Hammond and Rhoda Maria (Barber) Hammond. Afterher early education, she went to the University of Leipzig and thereafter to theUniversity of Oxford (1892-94), where she graduated B.A.with First-ClassHonors in 1894. Her mentor there, to whom she dedicated her second book (as"Scholar-Master-Friend'), was Arthur Sampson Napier (1853-1916), MertonProfessor of English from 1885 (the second epigraph of the first book is, "Andthat sweet city with her dreaming spires"). Returning to the United States,Hammond went to the University of Chicago as a Graduate Fellow in English(1895-98) and took her Ph.D. in 1898, the year in which John Matthews Manly,an almost exact contemporary, arrived in Chicago to begin his long reign there.She was a docent at Chicago from 1898 to 1904,when she resigned her post. Shecontinued to live in Chicago until the early 1920s,when she moved to Boston.She held no other academic post, and remained unmarried. She died onFebruary 23,1933.

Hammond's early career was extraordinarily ambitious and successful. Germany,with Oxford, was where the most rigorous philological and textual scholarship inthe field of Middle English was being carried on, and Napier himself taught at theuniversities of Berlin and Cottingen before being appointed to the Merton chair. Itwas in the German journal Anglia that Hammond first began to publish the streamof articles on the Chaucer and Lydgate manuscripts and other aspects of Chaucerand Chaucerian writing that were to form the foundation of her two books. She

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